After helping some desperate denizens of room 1 I’ve decided to put up a little guide to getting 3 stars on all levels (except lvl 80, fk lvl 80) using only common and a few uncommon cards.

UPDATE AFTER 28 OCT PATCH:There are 15 more levels than at the time this guide was written, and some cards have changed. In the original guide I also didn’t use any gear cards, because in the lower levels they aren’t really needed. The later levels become quite hard because of the sheer amount of gems the ai has, so I have updated the decks to include gear to enable better trades. I have to be honest: I haven’t tested it after the update, so if you feel the deck needs tweaking please comment.

RULE #1 FOR PLAYING GEAR: PUT THE GEAR ON COMMON CARDS AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A FULLY UPGRADED UNCOMMON IN PLAY, AI WILL ALWAYS TARGET THE HIGHEST RARITY AND HIGHEST UPGRADE LEVEL WITH GEARBREAKERS, REGARDLESS OF GEAR.(should this at any point change or not work, please comment)

Beat the opponent levels:

Before we start, forget that there is a thing called ‘time bonus’. The devs have cleverly tried to lure you into thinking that beating a level quickly will give you more points by putting a counter with bonus points to the left of the ones that actually give points: playing/promoting/destroying cards, and the holy grail of reaching stardom, HEALTH LEFT. These will be the ones this guide focuses on.

Decklist:8x legion urbanae (feel free to include 1 or 2 uncommons here, just don’t put gear on those)5x priest (these can all be uncommons to draw gearbreaking abilities, make sure at least a few are uncommon for this purpose)3x aquiles (can be either common or uncommon, they probably won’t be on the field to draw abilities though)3x principes (preferably common so you can safely gear them)2x escipion (common or uncommon)3x kite shield3x ballista2x morning star1x horse saddle

This is definitely not a hard list, if you are missing some copies feel free to switch stuff out for similar cards. Core of the deck are the legion urbanae and priests. The urbanae are statmonsters for their cost and will be used to block lanes, while you actively play, upgrade and sacrifice your priests to gain health. Ballistas are used to get rid of unwanted regular cards, aquiles do the same to heroes. The escipions are chosen for their impressive debuff and stats when fully upgraded (you will be playing for late late game anyway) and will be used together with equipped principes to whittle the opponent down.

Things to look out for: Enemy aoe (chariots, elephants); try to keep these low with your ballistas, an upgraded version that wipes multiple lanes will cost you a lot of health. Should you end up against a lvl 3 elephant anyway, keep throwing your priests in that lane to get them killed and not have to worry about the ai redrawing them any time soon. Honorable mention for lvl 90: the enemy has a wonder that makes his units unblockable for a turn, so try to keep the x2 guys from getting to big by use of ballistas and aquiles.

If there is anything in levels 91+ that you feel should be warned for or this deck can’t handle please comment

Beat the opponent (turns) levels:

Commend your urbanae and priests on a job well done and give them some well earned rest, because we’re going to have to ramp up the tempo.

If you don’t have enough of the troops to fill your deck you can use militia (fully upgraded with gear still decent), atlatists and/or viking berserkers to fill.

These will be a lot trickier than when I wrote this guide; back then militia were a lot stronger and combined with their heals they were perfect for these levels. There are 5 pretty much unbeatable levels in 80, 95, 97, 98 and 105, but if you manage to 3 star all the other you will have the, at this time, highest available reward. I also know I was advertising a common/uncommon only guide, but check your deck to see if you happen to have found a samurai armor (rare+ gear, gives hp per turn), if so include it and remember rule #1 for playing gear: Put it on a common while an uncommon of the same or higher lvl is in play. It is not needed however, as I don’t have it and never used it.

The idea of these levels will be: upgrade your cheap troops to lvl 3 and kill the opponent as fast as possible. Health is still king so use your cheap troops to kill enemy cards and the gear to trade as effectively as possible, preventing any damage done to you. You may need the occasional lucky redraw into an upgraded unit for tempo on hard levels or the even more occasional perfect draw every turn required for the 5 ‘impossible’ levels I mentioned earlier but the general idea will be the same every time.

Survival levels:

I’ll be honest, I decided to make this guide when revisiting the levels I didn’t score 3 stars on when going through the campaign the first time and none of these were survival missions, so I have no dedicated deck or even any testing done. Should you run into trouble anyway, my guess is the deck from the regular levels will do fine and you can even add in more urbanae and priests for cheaper stats and more health since you don’t need to actually do damage and/or cheap gear like kite shields/claymores/morningstars. If I’m completely wrong here feel free to aggressively tell me in the comments.

Feedback:

Should there be any devs reading this in their quest for stardom, I would recommend altering the time bonuses since they are basically useless in all types of levels. My suggestion would be one of these two: 1): multiply the existing bonus by 2-2,5 or 2) make the time bonus grow exponentially depending on turns left (e.g. 1000 for 1 turn, 3000 for 2, 6000 for 3 turns left). Though this will give early levels a relatively overpowered boost, it will open up more interesting ways of getting 3 stars in later levels.

Best of luck to you all, young starlets!

Framer

Last edited by framer on Mon Nov 09, 2015 1:57 am, edited 2 times in total.

You have to make sure you end the match with about 50hp more than you start it, that is enough on most lvls for 3*. Easiest way to do this is block 3 lanes with urbanae and keep playing and upgrading priests in the 4th.

i already manage to finish 1 that way it took e bout 30m to end, but cant finish the rest... i got 3 aztecs with one of them having 380 atack and almost every turn thoose elephants, its really hard to beat that way... btw i add 2 ramses instead of 2 urbanae and that was the reason why i won, cause he played a cant atack card in front of ramses...

Those are both common cards, so just putting a ballista on an urbanae/priest should handle those no problem. The elephants were the only unit that can cause some problems if they wipe 2+ units, so I find the best thing to do is just leave it up and putting priests in front of it so the ai cant redraw it. And the matches do take quite a long time with this tactic so I would only use this deck if you cant get 3* with your regular.